Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/128

 io8 A HISTORY OF ART ix CHALD.F.A AND ASSYRIA. in the trees, an attendant touches the harp, flowers and palms fill the back-ground, while a head, the head of the Elamite king-, whom Assurbanipal conquered and captured in his last campaign, hangs from a tree near the right 1 of the scene (see Figs. 27 and 28). The princes who took pleasure in these horrors were scrupulous in their piety. We find numberless representations of them in attitudes of profound respect before their gods, and some- times they bring victims and libations in their hands (see Fig. 29). Thus, without any help from the inscriptions, we may divine from PIG. 28. Feast of Assurbanipal, continued. No. 2, The king and queen at table. Drawn by Saint-Kline Gauticr. the sculptures alone what strange contrasts were presented by the Assyrian character a character at once sanguinary and voluptuous, brutal and refined, mystical and truculent. It is not only by what it says, it is by what it leaves untold, by what it forgets to tell, that art has left us such a sincere account of 1 Throughout this work the words "right" and "left" refer to the right and left of the cuts, not of the reader. By this system alone can confusion be avoided in describing statues and compositions with figures. ED.